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Or, Isabella's Counter Discourse in Measure

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Or, Isabella's Counter Discourse in Measure City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works School of Arts & Sciences Theses Hunter College Spring 5-9-2017 The Sounds of Silence; Or, Isabella’s Counter Discourse in Measure for Measure Gina Vivona CUNY Hunter College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/170 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] The Sounds of Silence; Or, Isabella’s Counter Discourse in Measure for Measure by Gina Vivona Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Program in Literature, Language, and Theory, Hunter College The City University of New York 2017 Thesis Sponsor: Cristina León Alfar April 30, 2017 Cristina León Alfar Date Signature May 4, 2017 Gavin Hollis Date Signature of Second Reader 2 Table of Contents Introduction: ........................................................................................................................................... 3 I Hope Here Be Truths; Or, The Measure Of My Argument ................................................................ 3 Section 1:................................................................................................................................................. 9 But I Do Bend My Speech; Or, Political Corruption as Fragmented Nation & Broken Body .............. 9 Section 2:............................................................................................................................................... 31 Silence That Fellow; Or, Punished Bodies Cleaved by Marriage ....................................................... 31 Section 3:............................................................................................................................................... 44 That’s Somewhat Madly Spoken; Or, Isabella’s Distressing Double Discourse ................................ 44 3 Introduction: I Hope Here Be Truths; Or, The Measure Of My Argument In William Shakespeare’s problem play, Measure for Measure, early modern vexations about gendered rhetoric are acknowledged head on. In the patriarchal culture of England, men feared eloquent women because female possession of discourse was equated with female control over the body – or what Judith Butler refers to as the physical “container” of a voice. Such autonomy heightens the reality of sexual freedom, and simultaneously intensifies the masculine nervousness regarding cuckoldry. My argument will strive to focus on the masculine fears linking gendered voice and gendered body to social consequences of those anxieties – poor reputation and public punishment. Viennese punishment in Measure is not a sign of absolute law; rather, it is a subjective, malleable concept enforced by the absolute authority of a tyrannous leader. Duke Vincentio’s attempts to regain control of Vienna become a harsh critique of patriarchal systems and the men who sit at the top of them. Although the Duke’s words ultimately possess the highest power, it is also important to recognize that his specific speech is a problematic site of authority because he operates as the biggest trickster of language: his words are rooted in deception and remove the opportunity for verbal consent; whether asserting his power through forced marriages in public or plotting bed tricks in private, the Duke’s commands are an attempt to regain control through the regulation of bodies. I suggest that the Duke’s long-term neglect of law and then temporary abdication of power is the root of a broken society, but also that physical estrangement and slander among the people are an extension of his political corruption. In the first section of this argument I highlight the ways that language is used to reduce whole bodies to separated parts, these verbal and physical fragmentations endorse the fact that the people of Measure live in a society where unregulated sexuality leads to inescapable physical exploitation, resulting in a complete loss 4 of female honor, or the ability to maintain chastity, and male honor, or the protection of female chastity through legal marriage. The second portion of this argument will focus on the way that the Duke uses marriage as a form of forced punishment to bring separated bodies back together. His irrefutable commands highlight his tyrannical power, but further allude to the illusion of subjectivity that is generated through speech because his subjects do not undoubtedly respect or obey him. Christina Luckyj’s work, A Moving Rhetoricke: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England, examines gendered, rhetorical impacts of patriarchal control, and her ideas bolster my claim that speech is not necessarily powerful and that silence is not a direct mark of compliance. I will use her idea as a touchstone throughout this paper to emphasize the inversion of Westernized philosophies which often associate speech and agency, and silence and erasure. She proposes, “If speech bears traces not of personal agency but of institutional constraint, are the men who can speak freer than the women who keep silent? If discourse is a site of the most insidious, internalized social controls, might silence offer a rival, less highly regulated space?” (5). I will unpack masculine language to reveal that it exploits women and reinforces “insidious” abuse toward the female body – which drives Isabella’s use of silence as protection and freedom from the patriarchy. Despite the fact that Isabella first uses powerful words to expose and defy corrupt leadership, her rhetoric also renders her vulnerable to Luckyj’s suggestion of masculine “internalized social controls.” Once Isabella returns to Vienna, her voice represents her intellectual ideas and criticisms, yet it is also “borrowed” by Claudio and Lucio to seduce Angelo and manipulated by the Duke to serve his own goals. Through Isabella’s linguistic artistry yet also her verbal dutifulness, we experience the waxing and waning of power triggered by speech. In The History of Sexuality Volume One, Michel Foucault captures this complex verbal struggle: 5 Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are…discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. (101) Foucault’s claim is an important one because it acknowledges the fact that speech is a potential mark of individual agency and “transmission” of power, but also as Luckyj suggests, it is a “hindrance” to that same power source because it creates the opportunity for expressions of rebellion or disloyalty. In the third section of my argument, I analyze how the Duke, Claudio, and Lucio require Isabella’s speech to exploit her body; they successfully set her up to “thwart” her own discursive power through speech, or by placing her moving mouth (a physical, penetrable bodily space) in front of Angelo. I do not imply that Isabella’s discourse is weak by any means – I believe it is consistently powerful throughout the play – but I do emphasize that masculine tendency to “undermine” and sexualize her words incites her to return to silence as an “opposing strategy.” Isabella’s speech, specifically her transition from strong discourse to defiant silence, is integrally tied to her choice to resist and disrupt social controls including the evasion of homogenous, heterosexual bodily expectations (i.e. marriage, motherhood, or whoredom). Despite her short stay in Vienna, Isabella interrogates social regulations that place women in the center of domestic households, and that invert “appropriate” patriarchal spaces for the female body to exist. I believe Isabella’s silence is the key ingredient that confuses the monitored binaries of duty and desire, law and violence, and honor and shame, and ultimately proves that women possessed the power to step beyond the parameters dictated by early modern patriarchal culture. To reveal the magnitude of the gendered, patriarchal fear that surrounds the female voice and form, I want to first draw attention to the concept of the corporeal body as a comprehensive body politic. As previously mentioned, societal fears of the early modern era 6 – including shameful slander, cuckoldry, and exile – were manifested and transcribed onto all impressionable, physical bodies via speech. In order to get to the heart of Isabella’s exceptional rhetoric, which includes her discourse and therefore physical mouth, it is necessary to slice into the form of social punishment, and furthermore, dissect the concept of tangible, public shame. When a “marked” body is considered a social signifier, or a coded layer of asomatous discourse, it becomes a powerful site of visible, gendered anxiety. Within the tumultuous landscape of Vienna, the Duke inflicts public punishment on bodies that uses shame as a method of social control to help reinforce lines of gender – which include structured relationships between sovereign and subject as well as husband and wife – as a manipulation of secular law that restores a failed patriarchal order, and lastly, as an attempt to serve justice to those who “deserve it.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
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